Bitwise CIO sees crypto growing 10–20x in the next decade, citing SEC Chair’s $68 trillion onchain forecast

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said he expects the crypto market to expand 10–20x over the next decade “without breaking a sweat,” framing the asset class’s long-term trajectory as his highest-conviction bet.

In a note to clients late Monday, Hougan highlighted recent comments from SEC Chair Paul Atkins, who told Fox Business last week that he expects all U.S. equity markets to move onchain “in a couple of years.”

With roughly $68 trillion in U.S. equities compared with about $670 million in tokenized stocks today, Hougan said the gap illustrates how early the transition remains and how large the shift in scale could be.

“Stablecoins will matter more. Tokenization will matter more. Bitcoin will matter more. And I think a dozen other major use cases will follow: prediction markets, decentralized finance, privacy tech, digital identity, new forms of equity, and more,” he wrote.

Uncertainty over winners strengthens the case for broad exposure

Despite that optimism, Hougan said he cannot confidently predict which blockchain networks will dominate. After eight years working full-time in crypto and speaking regularly with investors, founders, researchers, and foundations, he argued that at this stage of crypto’s development, it remains “unknowable.”

Outcomes will be shaped by regulation, execution, macro conditions, the actions of a few key individuals, and luck, among hundreds of other variables, he said, adding that people who claim certainty about which chain will win are “fooling themselves.”

That uncertainty informs his own investment strategy. Hougan said he prefers to buy the overall market through a market-cap-weighted crypto index fund rather than taking large directional bets on individual networks.

Hougan stressed that while he makes smaller individual bets on the margins, index exposure forms the core of his portfolio because it reduces the risk of backing the wrong chain even in a rapidly growing market.

“Imagine correctly calling a market that goes up 100,000x — and still underperforming because you backed the wrong horse,” he wrote.

As crypto’s use cases multiply and the ecosystem grows more complex, Hougan said he expects index funds to become “a big deal in 2026,” providing a way to capture the sector’s broad upside while navigating deep uncertainty about how the industry will ultimately evolve.

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